Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  She left her arm around me, and the snow came harder, but no winged monster bird came and picked out our eyes. It got colder, and her arm around me may not have been magic, but it was magic enough to get me and her off that mountain in one piece.

  ***

  Me and Aunt Ohio come off the trail where it met the highway. Gene had the Cadillac pointed off the mountain. Aunt Ohio hugged me, asked did I want a ride back to Mamaw’s. I said I didn’t. Aunt Ohio hugged me again.

  Albert was sitting in front of Hubert’s, and when he seen me he jumped on a four-wheeler and rode up to where I was.

  I said, “Albert, I aint in the mood to fool with you.”

  He said, “You seen Mom?”

  Even though Albert spent all his time with Hubert, the mainest source of Momma’s problems—actually, I considered Hubert the total source of all our problems—I couldn’t deny Albert cared for Momma. Albert was a walking menstrual cramp, but Momma brought out the sweetness in him. He tried to keep it hid. But everybody could see it.

  “No,” I said. “I aint seen her.”

  “You want a ride back to Mamaw’s?”

  I got on the back of Albert’s four-wheeler. Albert was thin, not fleshy like me. He wore a dark gray canvas coat. From behind, him and Mamaw had the same bird skull. He wore boots too big for him, gloves too big for him. He sped up and the cold air pressed our faces. He brought me to Mamaw’s carport.

  “Where would Momma be,” I said, “if she wasn’t with Hubert?”

  The four-wheeler seat creaked as Albert turned towards me. He shrugged. “You want to go look for her?” Albert said.

  Mamaw come out in a hurry and got in the Escort.

  “Mamaw,” I called, but she acted like she didn’t hear me. “Mamaw!” I called louder, but she pulled out of the carport. Albert hopped the four-wheeler in front of her. She stopped.

  “Get in,” she said back through the glass. I got in and she pointed at Albert. “You too.”

  Albert got in back. Mamaw took off, driving kind of crazy, which she does, but even more so than usual. When we got to town, people were looking at us funny, and Mamaw threw gravel turning onto the Drop Creek road. She passed coal trucks when there wasn’t room. Me nor Albert said a word, not even to ask where we were going.

  “They found your mother,” she finally said.

  “Is she all right?” Albert said.

  “They said for us to hurry,” Mamaw said.

  “Who?” Albert said.

  “Denny,” Mamaw said.

  And that was all was said.

  When we got to Denny’s, Denny and his daddy Fred and a bunch of others sat on four-wheelers. I was glad to see Keith Kelly wasn’t there. There was two four-wheelers didn’t have nobody on them, and Fred said something to Mamaw I didn’t catch, and Albert and Mamaw got on one four-wheeler, and I got on the other. I felt strange on that four-wheeler by myself, all them other motors rumbling like men on the porch outside a funeral.

  We took the path I’d taken when I stole one Thanksgiving. I wondered had Momma fallen down the same hole I had. I wondered had Momma fallen off the highwall. Had she OD’d or something like that, they would have taken her right to the hospital. The four-wheelers stopped. Mamaw was off hers first. She stared into the treetops. When I saw they was all looking up, I looked up too.

  Albert yelled, “What are you doing?”

  “What?” Momma said.

  Momma looked crow-sized she was so high up in a poplar tree. I about got sick looking at her. Albert asked her again what she was doing.

  “My business,” she said.

  We were scared for her, but her buzz brought a tiredness, an about-wore- out-ness to our worry.

  “Can you get down?” Mamaw said.

  “I don’t want to get down,” Momma said.

  “Aint no way she could get down,” Fred said, “not til she sobers up.”

  “Bless her heart,” somebody said.

  Mamaw rubbed her hand across her face. Albert walked up to the tree, sizing it up like he was going to climb up there after her.

  “You stay here, boy,” Fred said.

  “We should get Hubert,” Albert said. “Hubert could get her down.”

  Nobody said nothing to that. A bird sang, sounding happy like a bird can even though a bird aint got brain enough to be happy. We were within thirty yards of the highwall.

  “What are yall doing here?” Momma yelled down at us.

  “What?” Mamaw said, and Momma yelled her question again.

  Some of my cousins looked at each other like they were wondering the same thing, like they were thinking maybe they would leave Tricia Jewell up in that tree and go back and watch the ball game or maybe even do some chore for their wives.

  “Destruction!” Momma yelled. The sound hung in the air.

  Somebody said, “How long you reckon she’s been up there?”

  “Where’s her vehicle?” somebody else said.

  “Maybe somebody brung her.”

  “We could throw her a rope,” someone said. “I could go get a rope.”

  “Why don’t yall go away?” Momma yelled.

  “Pete’s got one of them harnesses he wears to work on power boxes up on poles for the cooperative.”

  “Thought they used bucket trucks for that.”

  “We could rig up a rope like a zipline, run her down that way.”

  Fred said that could work. “What do you think, Cora?” he said.

  “Somebody’ll still have to go up there,” Mamaw said. “Take her the rope, hook her up. Won’t they?”

  “I’ll go,” Albert said.

  “No,” Mamaw said.

  Momma sang, “If the real thing don’t do the trick, you better think up something quick . . . ooooh . . .” and then she trailed off.

  “I’ll go,” Denny said.

  Momma was a good thirty feet off the ground. She sat in a Y where the trunk split. A woodpecker laughed. My mind flashed to the time Momma’s sister June took me to a movie in Kingsport had a Woody Woodpecker cartoon on before it. My mother looked out over the strip job. I wished I could see what she was seeing. I wished I knew what it was like to be on the level with a woodpecker’s call. The sky screamed blue. The tree branches surrounded my mother.

  She waved at me. Light flooded her from behind. In a way, I did not want her to come down. I was glad to see her so high up. She had not escaped, but she was closer. And she was not so detailed to me there in the tree. I could not see vomit crusting on her cheek. I could not see the red swirl in the whites of her eyes like peppermint candy. All I could see was her beautiful stick-thin body wedged in the Y of the tree, the gold at the edge of her hair.

  Momma turned away from the strip job to look the other way. When she turned, she slipped and nearly fell. Too much weight hit on that ankle, turned it. Momma cried out “OH!” and Fred said, “Get up there and get her, Denny. Fore she falls out and kills herself.”

  Denny threw off his coat. His daddy and his cousin had to boost him. His crack showed as he pulled himself up on the lowest limb. Denny seemed too heavy to climb that tree. He hitched up his pants and up he went. I seen a bear climb a tree one time on Animal Planet. Denny climbing was like that. Big parts doing what they were supposed to do. Denny was our personal fire department, pulling me out of wrecked cars, climbing trees after Momma. His shoulders were big, powerful. He climbed in a T-shirt with a picture on back of all the American presidents who had been cockfighters. The backs of his arms turned red and splotchy. Up he went. The sun came piling through the trees, turned the back of my eyes green and spotty. I could not see Denny and my mother. My nose filled with the smell of molding wood, my ears with the pinging of the cooling four-wheeler engines.

  I moved to where I could see Momma and Denny better. Momma reached for Denny like a baby waiting for its mother to lift it out of a stroller. The bark of the tree stained her cheek. Her skin was torn, and the bark mixed with her blood. I could not see it, but it did.
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  “That tree aint gonna hold,” someone said. “They both coming down.”

  Denny got to my mother, and Fred threw a rope up to him. “We might as well bring it down, before it comes with them.”

  The men pulled on the rope, and the tree, which was already falling, came with their pull. The wood cracked and split. My other cousin walked in front of me. My nose almost caught on the side of his head.

  “Put it over yonder,” Fred said.

  My cousins dragged an old trampoline, its springs half-busted. I backed up. The trampoline stopped and the rope went tight, and the spot where my mother and Denny were in the tree ended up directly over the trampoline, and my mother’s legs come loose from the tree, and they dangled, like two strings, like the fringe on a cowboy shirt, and Denny’s arms circled her ribs, and her shirt rode up and I could see her belly beautiful and rounded, like a perfect sausage, and Fred went, “There you go,” and my mother come loose from Denny, from the tree, and she dropped to the trampoline, and my cousins, her cousins, moved towards her, towards the trampoline, and she bounced with an “Oh,” and two cousins reached out to keep her away from the place where the canvas sagged from the broken springs. Denny yelled “Move her,” and we looked up and heard the crack of the wood, and I grabbed my too-light mother by her ankle to make room for Denny to fall. When Denny fell onto the trampoline, the branches crashed on his back like water dumping out of a bucket. He bounced and rolled, and some of the branches smacked him in the face.

  They tried to stand Momma up, but her ankle was broke. Denny didn’t say a word as the wood rained down on him. Albert went to Momma. Fred and the other men went to Denny, looking up first to make sure nothing else was gonna fall, and then they reached in and threw all the wood off Denny, and he sat up on the trampoline, his elbows resting on his raised knees. Momma sat on a four-wheeler and asked one of the cousins for a cigarette, and he gave it to her, and she pulled out her own lighter and lit it. Albert put his arm around her shoulder. The woods were quiet then. There were eleven of us there in the room of trees, quiet and clear and calm.

  “Jesus Christ, Tricia,” Mamaw said. She did not walk towards Momma. She stood with her hand against the trunk of the tree Momma had been up in. Denny sat on the trampoline and got him a cigarette too. He did not get upset with Momma or anybody or anything else. I didn’t know what to think, what to do next. I felt like maybe I ought to run off.

  Up in the tree where Momma and Denny had been looked like lightning had struck, looked like a lot more time had passed than actually had.

  ***

  “Momma, what were you doing up there?”

  On the way home from the hospital, I sat in the back of Mamaw’s Escort with Momma. Albert sat up front. Mamaw drove. Mamaw always drove. Momma had her head in my lap and a cast on her ankle. Momma smelled of the tree. Her hair was greasy. She needed a bath. A long one.

  “I care too,” Momma said quiet.

  “Do what?” Mamaw said.

  “I care too.”

  Albert turned and looked at us. “About what?” he said.

  “About strip jobs. About things getting torn to pieces.”

  Mamaw didn’t say anything right off. Then when I thought she wasn’t going to say anything at all, she said, “I know you do, Tricia.”

  ***

  Momma had her arm around Albert’s shoulder as they made their way down the hall from Hubert’s kitchen. The kitchen table and counters looked like bears had been in there, packages tore open, jars busted in the sink and on the floor, everything edible licked clean. My cousins ate Hubert out of house and home every time he got put in jail. I followed Albert into the room my mother kept for herself in Hubert’s house. It was the only room without boards or cardboard or foil over the windows, the only room where you could see out. The rest of the house was sealed up tight.

  We set Momma down on a ratty couch somebody got out of a dump and Momma had cleaned and covered with a pink quilt. Albert disappeared, brung Momma back a glass of orange juice. Momma couldn’t settle. She bent and stretched and twisted.

  “Put some gin in that juice,” she said. “So’s I can settle.”

  I could barely hold my own head up. I closed my eyes and nearly fell over. I put my head on Momma’s shoulder.

  “You want to take a shower, Momma,” Albert said. “Dawn, run her a bath.”

  I didn’t think I had the strength to give my mother a bath, but I did. The bathtub was new, but cheap and plastic—and dirtier than she was. The water came good and hot, scalded the nasty off the sides of the tub. I rinsed it out, run more hot water. When it cooled a little, I picked Momma off the commode and set her down in the tub. I kept her bad foot out of the water. She smiled for me to touch her, smiled as I rubbed the soap on her. I ran the rag over the thin skin covering her ribs. Her chest felt like a pair of panty hose with a bird cage stuck up in one leg. At first I wished I’d just stood her up in the shower. I didn’t want to be giving her a bath.

  Man voices refilled the kitchen. They came down the hall, beat on the door, but it was locked. They went back to the kitchen. When I finished giving Momma a bath, she pulled on a T-shirt of Hubert’s, walked in her room, got in her bed, and turned out her light. I stood in the bathroom door and watched her across the thin hall. Albert come up from the kitchen where he’d been sitting with whoever it was come in.

  “She down?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. He went in the room and closed the door.

  “Come here, Dawn,” somebody hollered from the kitchen. “Come here, Dawn Jewell.”

  I didn’t acknowledge. Whoever it was kept on, but I still didn’t acknowledge. Finally they quit. Albert’s hand shook when he closed the door on Momma. I followed Albert out on Hubert’s porch. Albert slouched against the porch rail.

  “Why do you come out here to smoke?” I said. “They all smoke in the house.”

  Albert squinted and didn’t say anything.

  “Momma will sleep now,” he said half a cigarette later. “Be lunchtime tomorrow before we see her.”

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

  “You remember when she first got in the cake business?”

  “You couldn’t get up before her,” Albert said. “Couldn’t go to bed after her. That woman could stir.”

  Daddy used to call her “that woman” the way Albert did.

  “It aint getting no warmer, Albert,” I said. I wanted him to take me home. Albert flicked his cigarette out in the yard. He moved like he had a bad back, like an old man. I followed him. We got on the four-wheeler. He started out onto the Trail, out towards Mamaw’s. It was pitch-dark now, crystal sparkly dark night. A truck come up to us and stopped. The two men in the truck chewed tobacco. I could see their jaws working through the window glass. Big one driving rolled down the window. “What are you doing?” he said to Albert.

  “Taking her home.”

  “Hey, Dawn.”

  “Hey.”

  It was Crater. I didn’t hate Crater.

  “You’ns should come over,” Crater said. “Decent’s coming.”

  Decent Ferguson was a big woman. Older. Gone to college back in the wild free days. She was gray-headed but still had freckles like a girl.

  “You want to go?” Albert said to me.

  “Don’t matter.”

  Crater had Pickle Peters with him. Pickle Peters didn’t have no neck. His hair came down his forehead even with his eyes. That’s the way his momma cut it. Covered up the fact he had one eyebrow run clean across the front of his head. Pickle Peters was twenty-eight and never been to a barber shop. He raised his chin at me when he seen I was looking at him.

  “We’ll be up there after while,” Albert said.

  Crater pulled off without rolling up his window.

  “Well,” Albert said, “you don’t want to go, do you?”

  ***

  Crater had a high house. When I got off the four-wheeler, I felt like the house might
fall over on me. We walked the wooden steps up from the underneath-the-house carport, through the darker-than-dark dark. When we walked in Crater’s house, Decent was on the edge of her chair, her arm reared back like she was fixing to throw something.

  “I drew back the skillet,” she said, “and let it sail. ‘Whoopwhoopwhoop’ it went. Skillet landed ‘thunk,’ right in the small of his back, and he went down like he was shot. I thought I’d killed him. Momma came out went berserk.”

  Crater’s wife Priscilla covered her nose to keep snot from blowing out she was laughing so hard.

  “Did you get your hamburger back?”

  “Yeah, I did. He still had it in his hand. Knocked out cold and never turned loose of that hamburger.”

  “He was a sight,” Priscilla said getting up off the hard chair she was sitting on. She went to the kitchen. “Albert,” she said, “they’s beer and pop in the cooler. Chili in that pan. Yall help yourself. Hey, Dawn.”

  Just as I sat down, Decent got up to smoke.

  “Crater won’t let us smoke in here no more,” Decent said. “How about that? World gone wrong, aint it?” Decent hacked. “I need to quit anyway.”

  The men slapped Albert on the back. “What say, little badass?”

  There was one other female there. She was drawn back into the sectional sofa, lost in her buzz. Bottle-white blonde hair and black-ringed eyes. Her smooth cheeks said she hadn’t been running with this bunch long. They all looked at me. I had no doubt they knew about me stealing the truck and the car, but nobody said anything. Albert got up. Brought me a beer.

  “How tall are you?” Pickle said.

  “Five ten.”

  “You done growing?”

  I twitched my shoulders.

  “Put your hand up here.” He raised his hand, and I put mine flat against his.

  “God damn,” he said. “That’s a big old Sasquatch hand.” Pickle held me by the wrist. “Where’d you get that big old Sasquatch hand?”